On Thursday, September 6th Professor Michael Berube delivered a lecture entitled "Intellectuals and Publics" at noon, in Tivoli Student Union Turnhalle on the Auraria Higher Education Campus. The event was co-sponsored by the Office of Student Life. Later that evening, at the Laboratory of Art and Ideas, Berube presented a second lecture entitled "Whatever Happened to Cultural Studies?"

These lectures officially opened the Center for Public Humanities' inaugural lecture series "New Visions of the American Scholar."

Michael Berube, Paterno Family Chair in Literature at Penn State University, is the author, most recently, of the books What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and 'Bias' in Higher Education and Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Harper's, American Quarterly, and many other academic and mainstream journals.